Category: Quotes

Open-minded about Religion

“If being in a state of open-mindedness means that you’re asking questions, seeking knowledge, and attempting to fairly evaluate data without bias, it seems that that should be a transitory state — at some point, you find the answers. And once you’ve found the answers to your questions, you’re no longer open to the alternatives (unless you get some new data) because you’ve already evaluated them and rejected them as untrue.

Yet I rarely hear open-mindedness about religion described this way. It’s usually described as a long-term plan, a way of life, e.g. “It’s important to us to raise our children to be open-minded about religion.” It seems to me that if you intentionally plan to stay in that state indefinitely, then what you’re really saying is that you believe that objective truth about spiritual matters cannot be known. And if that’s the case, then you’re taking an active stance against the three major monotheistic belief systems (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that teach that objective truth does exist and can be known.”

– Jennifer Fulwiler

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Love Requires Sacrifice

“It may be different in another world, but in this world, all love requires a sacrifice, and with that sacrifice there is inevitable pain. To reject sacrifice as the condition for the possibility of love is to live an essentially loveless existence.”

– Fr. Steve Grunow

Adoration in the Soul

“It is […] in the intimacy of your soul, where the God of majesty abides, that you must adore Him continually. From time to time, place your hand over your heart, saying to yourself: ‘God is in me. And He is there not only to sustain my physical life, as in irrational creatures, but He is there acting and operating, to raise me to the highest perfection, if I do not put obstacles in the way of His grace.”

– Mother Mectilde de Bar

Suppressed Writing

“I think also that you are suffering from suppressed ‘writing’. […] I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering.”

– The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

Feminism’s Masculine Bias

“The traditional feminist solution to the “problem” of female biology is unfettered access to contraception and abortion: this reveals an ironically masculine bias. Rather than seeking to change social structures to accommodate the realities of female biology, the feminist movement, since its second wave, has continually and firmly fought instead for women to alter their biology, often through violence, so that it functions more like a man’s. Tellingly, the legal right for a woman to kill a child in her womb was won before the legal right for a woman not to be fired for being pregnant. The message is clear: women must become like men to be free.”

– Abigail Favale

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Regularity in Private Prayer

“It is very easy to be religious by fits and starts, and to keep up our feelings by artificial stimulants; but regularity seems to trammel us, and we become impatient. This is especially the case with those to whom the world is as yet new, and who can do as they please. Religion is the chief subject which meets them, which enjoins regularity; and they bear it only so far as they can make it like things of this world, something curious, or changeable, or exciting. Satan knows his advantage here. He perceives well enough that stated private prayer is the very emblem and safeguard of true devotion to God, as impressing on us and keeping up in us a rule of conduct. He who gives up regularity in prayer has lost a principal means of reminding himself that spiritual life is obedience to a Lawgiver, not a mere feeling or a taste.”

– John Henry Newman